3/25/2011

Paul Krugman is a liar

Krugman's latest blog post "Researchers Republicans Like" contains his typical vicious and dishonest attacks. This time they are about me. Apparently, some Wisconsin Republicans attacked a University of Wisconsin academic in a way that Krugman thought was unfair and mean, and thus Krugman decided to go and attack me as someone who Republicans rely on. As to his claims, I have written extensively about most of these attacks. I will just deal with the first couple of his claims here.

"John Lott first attracted notoriety with a pro-gun-ownership study nobody else could duplicate; his original data, he said, was destroyed by a hard disk crash."

1) There is a whole list of studies have duplicated my research on gun control (see here for a slightly out of date list). I even had a letter in Krugman's own New York Times in January pointing this fact out (available here). If Krugman has evidence that these papers that I cite do not duplicate my work, he should provide his evidence.2) The original data that was used in my regressions was replaced after a hard disk crash and given out to well over a couple hundred academics. David Mustard and I had given out this data to some critics before the crash (Dan Black, Dan Nagin, and Jens Ludwig), but they would not give us back a copy of the data so David and I spent months putting the data back together again. But we did put it back together and we did lend out that data to others, as demonstrated by the papers that have been published by those using the data.

Paul Krugman lies about a lot of things. Sometimes his lies aren't even necessary to further the point he's trying to make. I recently created this website featuring a lie Krugman told about John Maynard Keynes's connection to eugenics. http://www.paulkrugman.org/